Words set to music, with a few notes missing

Listening to a Bach fugue, a guitar riff or even a nursery rhyme sets a person's brain running, hunting for patterns, creating expectations and performing feats of memory. The listener is blissfully unaware that their brain is jumping through hoops to bring them the experience we call "music".

In The Music Instinct, Philip Ball has gone further than anyone in challenging Elvis Costello's dictum that writing about music is like dancing about architecture; having said that, the book could be a slog for readers who start with a limited understanding of scales, key signatures, intervals and musical notation. The initial chapters have deceptively simple subtitles such as "what are musical notes" and "what gives music its pulse", but rapidly become a real challenge in spite of valiant efforts by Ball, who uses diagrams, anecdotes and a multitude of examples to get his point across.

The later chapters are easier, addressing topics such as whether listening to Mozart's music makes people smarter (the "Mozart effect") and the relationship between music and language. However, for a book with "instinct" in the title, Ball is surprisingly cautious about citing an evolutionary or even biological basis for our musical likes and dislikes. It is only when explaining how music conveys and elicits emotion that he is prepared to propose an evolutionary explanation for our love of music. Ball argues that composers toy with our inclination to try and predict the future - an inclination that evolved as a survival tactic.

While many topics about music are covered in this authoritative tome, a notable omission is the social role of music. Ball does note that "we should never forget that music takes place in a social context" but, unfortunately, this comes on the penultimate page. The manner in which music creates a group identity, rather than being an isolated individual experience, does not get the attention it deserves.

However brilliantly Ball writes, and however extensive his knowledge and insights, Elvis Costello's challenge sometimes defeats the author. Without being able to immediately listen to the musical scores he depicts or the tracks he cites, one is inevitably left having to take his arguments on faith rather than on the evidence.

Book Information:
The Music Instinct: How music works and why we can't do without it
by Philip Ball
The Bodley Head, £20

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